There where space passes its violin arch over the horizon and man is transformed into a bird and the angel into a precious stone.

The Eternal Father is manufacturing darkness in his laboratory and is working to turn the deaf  blind. He has an eye in his hand and doesn't know in whom to put it. And in a jar he has an ear mating with another eye.

We are faraway, at the end of ends, where a man suspended by the feet from a star swings himself in space with his head down ward. The wind that bends the trees gently tosses his hair.

Flying creeks alight in the new forests where the birds curse the dawn of so many useless flowers.

How rightly they insult the pulsations of those dark things.

If one were attempting only to behead the captain of the flowers and to make his heart of superfluous feeling bleed, the heart full of secrets and bits of the universe.

The mouth of a loved man on a drum.

The breasts of the unforgettable girl nailed on the same tree where the nightingales pecked them.

The statue of the hero at the Pole.

To destroy everything, everything, with bullet and knife.

The idols duel under the water.

Isolde, Isolde, how many kilometers separate us, how many sexes between you and me.

You well know that God plucks out the eyes of flowers since his mania is blindness.

And he transforms the spirit into a parcel of feathers and he transforms the beloveds sitting on roses into pianola serpents, into sister serpents of the flute, of the same flute that is kissed on nights of snow and that summons from far away.

But you do not know for what reason the blackbird tears apart the tree under his bloody fingers.

And this is the mystery.

Forty days and forty nights climbing from branch to branch as in the Deluge. Forty days and forty nights of mystery among rocks and peaks.

I could fall from destiny to destiny but always I'll keep the memory of heaven.

Are you acquainted with the visions of the heights? Have you seen the heart of light? Sometimes I transform myself into an immense forest and traverse worlds like an army.

Look at the entrance of rivers.
 

***
 

The sea may just be my theatre some evenings.

The street of dreams has no trees, nor a woman crucified on a flower, nor a ship passing the pages of the sea.

The street of dreams has an immense navel from where a bottle sticks out. Inside of the bottle there is a dead bishop who changes colour every time the bottle moves.

There are four candles that light up and go out following succeeding turns. Sometimes a bolt of lightning makes us see in the sky a torn-up woman who has been falling for the last hundred and forty years. 

The sky hides her mystery.

On all the scales one assumes a hidden murderer. Cardiac singers die just by thinking about it.

Just so the sickly butterflies will return to their state of worms, out of which they should never have come. The ear will relapse into infancy and will be filled with marine echoes and those algae that float in the eyes of some birds.

Only Isolde knows the mystery. But she traverses the rainbow with trembling fingers in search of a special sound.

And if a blackbird should peck her eye, she would let it drink all the water it wants with that very smile of hers that attracts herds of buffalo.

On what heart distended with bitterness would you float on all the oceans, on any sea?

For you must know that gripping to a heart as to a buoy is dangerous on account of the marine grottos that attract them and where the octopuses are knots of snakes and elephant trumpets that forever close off their exit.

Be aware of what a mountain is with arms raised begging pardon and realize that it is less dangerous than seas and more  amenable to friendship.

Nevertheless, your fate is to love what is dangerous, the dangerous that is inside you and outside you, to kiss the lips of the abyss relying on occult aids for the final victory of all your undertakings and your dreams covered in dew at dawn.

Otherwise be grateful and withdraw to the depth of the memory of men.

Isolda, Isolda, in the ice age bears were flowers. When the thaw came they were freed from themselves and they came out running in every direction.

Ponder the resurrection.

You alone must know the miracle. You have seen the miracle occurring before a hundred marvellous harps and all the cannons pointing at the horizon.

There was then a file of sailors before a king in a distant country. The waves were awaiting patiently the return of kind. Meanwhile the sea applauded.
 
 

***
 

The thermometer was slowly descending because the blackbird had ceased singing and thought of jumping out of a trapeze into the middle of the world.

Now I am afraid of only one thing and that is that you will emerge from a lamp or from some vase and speak to me in eloquent terms as magnolias speak in the evening. The room would be filled with agonising dragonflies and I would have to sit down so as not to fall unconscious on the floor.

The dead woman would be thought itself. Reflected wherever eyes turn.

Over the castle the general's skeleton was a signal like a semaphore. We will count the skulls that are dragged through the country tied by an endless rope to the tail of a somnambulant horse, which no one recognises as his.

The black male slaves will applaud over the womb of the female slaves as drunk as themselves without realising that the wind is a ghost and that the trees there in the distance are floating over a graveyard.

Who has counted all the dead?

And if all the windows were opened and if all the lamps begin to sing and if the cemetery is set on fire?

For every bird of the sky there will be a hunter on land.

The clarions will sound and the flags will become Bengal lights. Faith died, all the birds of prey died that were picking your heart. 

Migratory statues pass in flight.

On the immense plain one hears the ordeal of  idols among the songs of the trees.

The frightened flowers flee.

The doors of an unknown music open and the years of the magician will emerge  who in his death throes stays seated with his hands on his chest. 

How many things have died inside of us. How much death are we carrying inside of us. Why bind ourselves to our dead? Why do we insist on resurrecting our dead? They stop us from seeing the idea that is born. We are afraid at the onsetting new light, to which we are not yet accustomed like our dead motionless and stripped of all and dangerous surprises One must leave the dead thing for the living one.

Isolde, bury all your dead.

Think, remember, forget. Let your memory forget your memories, let your oblivion remember its oblivions. Take care not to die before your death.

How to bestow a little grandeur on this present beast that only bends its knees in exhaustion at these high hours when the moon comes flying and places itself up ahead.

And, nevertheless, we live waiting on chance, the forming of a sidereal sign in that expiatory beyond which will not reach arrival nor the sound of our bells.

Just so, waiting for the great chance.

Let the North Pole fly off like the greeting hat.

Let that continent arrive  we are awaiting so many years ago, here sitting behind the bars of the horizon.

Let the murderer run past, uncontrollably firing bullets at his pursuers.

Let it be known why that girl was born and not the boy promised by dreams and announced so often.

Let the corpse yawning and stretching under the earth be seen.

Let the glorious ghost as it walks through heaven's groves be seen.

Let all the rivers suddenly stop at a single voice of command.

Let the sky change place.

Let the seas rise up in a great pyramid higher than all the Babels dreamt up by ambition.

Let the wind beat in despair and put out the stars.

Let a luminous finger write a word on the nightsky.

Let the house up ahead collapse.

For this we live, believe me, for this we live and for nothing else. For this we have voice and for this we have a network in our voice.

For this we have that painful racing inside our veins and that gallop of an animal wounded in the chest.

For this the flesh martyred by words blushes and thought grows watered by subterranean rivers.

For this the howl of  shock inherited from the most tragic grandfather.

Cut off the head of the monster that roars the door of dream. And then let no one forbid anything.

Someone speaks and a poppy is born on the summit of voice before the opiate of future gaze shines.

--Peace on earth to the sailor of night.

The silent explorers raise their head and adventure is stripped of its golden dress.

Here is the feeling of sunset.

Perhaps sunset will take note of us and then you will have understood the signals of  night. You will have understood the inventions of silence. The gaze of dream. The threshold of the abyss. The mountains' journey.

The cruise of  night.

Isolde, Isolde, I am following my destiny.

Where have you hidden the oasis you promised me so often?

The light got tired of walking.

Tell me, where do you carry that ladder that comes out of your eyes and is lost in the air?

Do you know it's my destiny to walk? Do you know the vanity of the explorer and the ghost of adventure? 

It is a question of blood and bones in front of a special magnet. It is the irrevocable destiny of a fabled meteor.

It is not a question of love in the flesh, it is a question of life, a question of a wandering spirit, of a nomadic bird.

All those women are trees or stones, perhaps unnecessary, lying on the road.

Bottles of water and barrels of drunkenness usually without proper light. They are like cathedrals that follow a musical principle. Every chord has its correspondent and everything consists in knowing how to touch the spot of the echo that must answer. It is easy to make fabrics of sound and to build a true roof or magnificent domes for days of rain.

If fate allows it, we can take shelter for a time and count the fingers of her who holds out her arms to us.

Then the phantom will make us be again on our way. We shall leap over the beating breasts that are her cupolas, because she, stretched out on her back, imitates temples. Rather, temples imitate her, with their towers like breasts, their central cupola like a head and their door that desires to imitate sex through which life that pulsates in the womb comes out afterwards. 

But we must not accept a similar imitation, nor can we believe in such a life. In that life that emerges with the eyes bandaged and goes crashing into the trees of the countryside. We shall only believe in the flowers that are cradles of giants, although we know that inside of every cocoon a dwarf sleeps.

And far back the mountains of live rock sweetly smile.

The mountains smile because a blind man is seated upon them to hear the volcano's drums roll. But what happens on the plains is more important still, since the trees of the forest have become serpents and rhythmically fight by reason of a special flute.

I forgot to tell you that there is also a lake and that this lake distances itself according to the direction of the wind. Sometimes it manages to lose itself from view, sometimes it spends long years absent to come back its colour changed. Sometimes it is hungry and curses the men who are not shipwrecked at the due hour. At other times it journeys on four paws and gnaws for hours and hours on the spoils of so much tragedy, piled up on its shores or the mirages of one who knows what secret times.

If the eye's bird falls into the lake, a geyser leaps up in the mountain. A beautiful geyser like a tree with a woman swinging on its top. 

The lake also can also swing on the top of the tree. Everything depends on my will and on the drum that rolls in time.

All those spies concealed behind the trees are not waiting for the miracle like those who would gladly have us believe, but the nude, blind woman coming out every evening to take her lost statue for a stroll and dashing into them.

You are wasting time.

Look, look, there is a fire in the moon.

Dressed in white Isolde came like a cloud. Then the moon began to fall enveloped in flames. On the beaches a fiery reflection was dancing.

Spectres emerge one by one from every rising wave. You who are concealed there, the hour of trembling arrived before the voracity of death.

The setting sun makes an aureole over the head of the last shipwrecked man who floats on the drift without hearing any longer the songs of the shore.

Wolves go strolling with their eyes glittering through the night's branches, closely interlocked and weeping with o precise cause.

That man, bigger than the others, opens his mouth in the middle of the garden and begins to swallow glowworms for entire hours.

The trees are twisted because of a strange pain. And a quantity of meteors that fall from the sky form a spiral in our atmosphere as if they were stones in the water.

A dense smoke comes out from all sides. Now only the eyes of the wolves glitter and the man full of glow worms. All else is shadows.

The mountain opens its doors and the blind man enters with outstretched arms.

A tree, a big tree that writhes in the fire of twilight.

Above God a recently born planet is swaying.

Aureoles fall on the earth. One after another the hundreds of aureoles are falling on the earth, some over certain heads ... And nothing else?

An island of palm trees rises up from the sea for the lovers who stroll clasped in each other's arms. 

Some day one of them will find the head that has been lost, inert in the very place where he lost it.

When? Where? Which of them?

See, Isolda, the torment behind the mountain. See the torment.

The migratory forests will not come so faraway.

There is a lone sandal in the middle of the earth.

The progress of the passing evening is felt in the depths of the sea. At the moment when all things turn brilliant with intoxication.

There is a hat beyond at the height of the head.

There is a stick stuck in the ground and at the height of a hand.

And there is nothing else. Because none of you can see the ghost that smiles at the dog at this instant.

No one knows why the curtains behind the bed moved.

Nor why Isolde's cheeks blushed like the two curtains that are embarrassed.

And why did here feet tremble like the two curtains that part.
 
 

* * *
 
 

I would be capable of weeping at dawn to see you smiling. 

I would be capable of begging the greeting of the spectre that solemnly journeys towards the Stone Age.

You know it well, for you I will pass like a reflection from forest to forest. What more do you want? 

Two bodies entwined domesticate eternity. 

It is necessary to bend the knees.

Then the castle turns into a flower, an eye turns into a river full of boats and every kind of fish.

The piano becomes a mountain, the sea a small artichoke that turns like a windmill.

The nerves become a tree full of tremblings and its tremblings spread in the night at intervals into infinity.

The brain rolls down the body and goes off no one knows where. At the same time the forests flee in disorder. The torment of the bones begins, with their sack of clouds on their back, descending from the peak of the silent womb, sad like a witch's bird, like the night-threatened flower.

Prepared by solitude, everything is possible. Right at the start, a woman hanging from each lamp swings in the air we breathe. A music comes out of every picture in the wall, since we know every landscape is a musical instrument. And behind every door is a skeleton impatiently waiting.

Completely abandoned, the night weeps in its retreat. Night ausculates your heart. Night, remember? When the curtains took the shape of ears and the form of eyelids with eyelashes of silence. Then I bent over your body as over a dissecting table, sank my lips into you and looked at you; your womb like a living wound and your eyes like the end of the world.

Dragged along by solitude, Isolda, we submerge sink in the night that waits for us at the foot of the house.
 
 

***
 
 

We have walked a great deal. The searchlights desperately rummaged in the night, raced this way, crossed one another in the infinite, greeted and parted forever. Suddenly a hand emerged out of mid-sky, a hand as of someone shipwrecked, and crushed under its fingers the head of a bird that fell, without any protest from its lips, slowly on to the earth.

We were on the shore of the sea. A wave came racing and fished up the dead bird and carried it off. The shore's mountain had a small chill, then from its cetacean back spouted a spurt of fresh and crystal water that seemed inside a distant showcase.

Thus returned the hour of serenity drawm by the hand of a comet that no one knew how to christen and the children called, it was never known why, Eloisa's mane.

One can still see in the nights the eye that floats like a desolate almond. 

One can still see the ship that passes through the air with its nets spread out.

One can still see the drowned man floating with his luminous body between two waters.

One can still see the sailing ship like a cross on its endless Golgotha.

One can still see the pirates clinging to the floating keel and the captain hanging from the main mast on the high sea.

One can still see in the flash of lightning the pale helmsman with his beard to the wind.

One can still see the flash of lightning the naked dead woman with her swollen breasts.

One can still see by the flash of lightning a rapist horse disappear in the distance.

One can still see on moonlit nights the floating hand.

But the sirens' fish with their hair in entwined in the nets are not seen again and we have vainly waited.

We have greeted all the waves, we have looked attentively, we have waved our hats and our kerchiefs, we have gambled their breasts at dice on the deck of thousands of ships. All useless. The accomplices of dawn heard the flowers on their way, they heard the progress of the polar light and once more the progress of the hero toward the Stone Age.

But no one will see the torment of the sirens.

In vain you raise your fingers pointing at every fold of the sea and every trembling of the clouds.

I am telling you, she is more dangerous than the night.

A bird as solitary as the seas moves off slowly perhaps because of your shouts.

It moves off slowly, as I said, towards the marvels of its own dream. The sense of the evening moves off slowly.

The panorama of this budding secret is not for you. what do you know of encounters in eternity?

I tell you again, she is more hidden than the night at midday.

No use rigging up for this happy exploration. Nor for the unmoved catches of fish scarcely lit up by the internal light of the sea, scarcely rocked by silence or solitude.
 
 

***
 
 

Who was the murderer?

Before the judge is the corpse of the woman like the mummy of the most beautiful  pharaoh queen.

Shout, accusers.

No use the judge to scrutinise the eyes of the bystanders. The shape of no present eye corresponds to the shape of the wound that is still seen blood soaked on the naked breast.

A violent squall closes all the eyelids.

Gentlemen, who heard the shot?

Did no one see a shadow fleeing through the window? Did no one see a light in the middle of the night?

All eyes turn towards the big man who was eating the glow worms in the garden.

Through the transparency of his body one can see something like a dagger or a lily concealed, but the tranquility of the presumed criminal sows doubt in his accusers.

Two tears roll down his cheeks.

'It's him, it's him,' some shout.

'It's not him, it's not him,' others shout.

The roll of drums comes down through the sky as if a rain of stones were falling on the moon.

The accused remains imperturbable. With his big eyes fixed not twinkling, even at the moment in he feels a crown start to form around his brow.

Everyone looks towards the streets. The cortege that sprang out of the triumphal explosion is crossing. The flags unfurled as the wind. Everyone looks but he doesn't move an eye.

'The criminal. The criminal.'

When the mob rushed on, a thousand fists went to smash into a marble statue that stared at the horizon.

Then on the horizon a comet appeared with a long gown of glow worms and began to rise up over the sky that received it with open arms.

In a few minutes in the depth of the same horizon a window opened and the beloved showed up with beautiful sleepy eyes looking at the comet and trying to guess the presage, perhaps painful, its presence among men was announcing. What magical signs does the beloved make with her hands white as heaven? She has in her hand a perfect diamond out of which a fountain of waters starts to spring slowly gently towards us.

Suddenly a deafening shriek rises in the air.

'To the guillotine. The guillotine. The guillotine.'

Moments later, when before the bloodthirsty mob, the fatal knife severed the marble head of the accused, a huge jet of light endlessly spurted from the neck.

In the same instant there was a frightful tremor in the sky. Stars shattered into a thousand pieces, planets burst into flame, bits of the moon went flying, the burnt coals of the volcanoes of other heavenly bodies leaped up and sometimes they came squeaking to cleave to the bulging eyes of men.

The mob fled in terror. Some hid themselves seeking relief under the earth, others fell on their knees beating their breast and with arms raised to the heaven imploring forgiveness.

The jet of light went on oozing out of the neck of the executed man on the platform of death.
 
 

***
 

In the middle of the catastrophe and the general confusion some arms more powerful than a hundred seas clutching to my neck.

'Isolda, Isolda, is it you?'

'How many years away one from the other?'

'A similar hecatomb was needed for us to meet again.'

'You, tree of wisdom, with mature eyes in the gate of sleep and that elephant walk with idol feet.'

'Give me  your breasts to kiss. Show me your breasts.'

'Always waiting for the age of marvels like the magician's dove.'

'Let me kiss your breasts.'

The captive angel  breaks his chains and flies through the air, pursued, in vain, by some inept shots.

The powerful and solitary night falls again. The serpents lit up by the storm race in bounds after the liberated angel impossible to catch.

Isolde clings to me, is enchased in my arms.

In the forge of lightnings one can hear the hammerings with which the storm fashions the crown for my kingly head.

How many people this all-too-shining crown made blind? Countless are those who look at the man and see the ultimate vision of their life. The handsome giant dying upon the sea, only asks to see it so as to return to life or to die in peace..

Many are the visions engraved on it as on a frieze. On it one sees the body of a woman burning in the fire that rises from her own flesh and there is no way to extinguish the flames.

And so many other visions. Like that of the dwarfs who pass flying carrying on their shoulders the coffin of a Titan.

And that of the island plucked out by the wind that falls on city.

And that of the lightning interwoven with the rain of the storm.

And that of the palm trees bent under the wheels of the hurricane.

And that of the cloud mountain that halts so long that a sweet vegetation begins to grow in it.

And that of the bitter night when we ourselves shall be dying. I think the moment is here to think about the night when we shall all be dying.

'Isolde, I love you and through all the others I have only sought to love you more.'

Bitter is the night and profound the abyss where your arms flung me. Twitching I am falling, my hands in despair, like a Niagara irremissibly lost. 

The foam will spray my face before reaching the bottom. Noise stuns the ears, it bounces off my brain before my body shatters in the depths.

Nevertheless, I still smile waiting from one moment to another that my body may feel  lighter than air.

O let a lasso fall from who knows what star, and catch me and raise me up before hitting the ground.

'Isolde, see the attitude of the perfect man.'

The wind sways from side to side. Below, the gazes of men bind me to their earthly terror on a doleful plain on which a solitary house is seen in the distance and a cloud of smoke that tries to raise the house to the sky. 

The house of the crime will never be free of its bit of region. Yet, despite the fact of the show becoming more wretched than ever, the night is more brilliant than ever, there is no free place in all the sky. And this, to see what?

The throat of the beautiful woman has the form of a song.

And she will sing, she will sing assured that I have not yet died. She will sing despite the season too far advanced, despite the night that rolls from the mountains, despite the difficulties of the terrain. She will sing.

And the child will stop crying over his small white ship. And the finest star will come out on top of its head, at the back of the alcove, beyond the sensitive pillows, on the true reefs of his ultimate sleep.

Perhaps we shall hear the voice mingled with an enormous song because the sea is stretched over several pianolas and sometimes abandons itself to its own instincts.

Then the hour of transfiguration arrives. The sea sweats and writhes in an intimate pain. Every wave becomes an angel and flies.

Woe is he who dared to raise his hand above the sea!

You do not know and therefore I am telling you: On the nights when no one sees it, the sea becomes a great monument and they say that on its edge its own statue solemn on its feet.No one will ever know what the truth is or the number of mistakes in all the instincts of his life.

On what amount of errors are all of man's discoveries made?

Those discoveries lovelier than an electric spark and than the legs of a woman. Here all the wise men bow, here the prophets kneel, here the cock crows and where his song ends a scene is born as you all know. Then only the hands of the shipwrecked are visible, bound to the waves and a bottle that floats and moves on to tell the story of so much grief.

Isolde, if you only knew!

The sky has changed seven times. And it will change again because of the sea. Because the sea has turned into a globe and  unfastened its moorings and set off through the sky.

What's the idea of pointing your cannons and tolling the bells?

On the horizon, the setting sun stretches out its hand and looked at us just through its five fingers separated like the spokes of a wheel. What can we do? 

Over the lonely field there falls the egg of an eagle as it flew not knowing where to direct its flight. This wil be the field of fertility for some years and perhaps on that very spot a great capital might arise.

Telescopes rise up and are lost in eternity. The sky undresses. Aerolites and lightnings cross past the Milky Way, the ceremonial cortege of comets moves by and no one now fears the wrath of God. 

The sky undresses and the agonizing eyes of everything it believed are seen.

The sky undresses and one can see the deathlike eyes of him who created everything.

The sky undresses and one can see the nocturnal ghost that brings daily nourishment to the heavenly bodies.

The shy undresses and one can see the cave of candelabras in whose center sleeps the woman of flesh we all know, enveloped in her hair.

The sleepwalking zebras gallop by and the windows and one can be see the windows that open into darkness, stuck to the night like parasites.

Ah, if only you knew! I am hidden away inside your shadow. I am the newborn tree inside your eyes. I am the child of naked feet like a statue that shouts in the shipwreck among the impassible reflections.

I am the spectre that moves off in the distance guided by its doves, those doves full of wisdom that are nourished on the light of the flickering streetlamps.

Here I am exhausted and terrible, more terrible than the drifting ship that goes off howling through the sky and dies gently like a man or like a dog when he feels for the first time the weight of his skeleton under his flesh.

Ah, if you saw! When the maternal womb opens like a cage and a woman raise her arms to the infinite, offering all future flights.

If you saw! The trembling rooftops before rising up forever. The roofs that will set off who knows whither with their cargo of clouds.

If you saw now the insect that leaps to the contact of two vindictive ropes and that can even take the form of a man for the eyes that look attentively.

And the unconsciousness of night surrounded by a deep canal; the unconsciousness of trees, their frequent fights. How many times have I seen them insult each other, pull each other by the hair over a bird.

Before such mysteries, before such hidden forces, the unconsciousness of the sea that could suddenly split in half, an incredible thing.

But you know that the day will come on which they will be touched by grace like the mountains and then each one will have an aureole around it.

Then we shall see the girls who come out of school, in a light flight of their tresses to the wind heading towards  the mountebank who awaits them at the entrance of the volcano.

We shall see the statue that strolls above the houses, washed by the rain like the wounds of the warrior. We shall see the transformation of silence and the ecstasies of whoever ponders the games of sunset and later on the star winking in the current of air.

But only the man who agonises will see a flower stirring the hands inside the womb of the beloved woman. And then death will be drunk in a gulp.

The woman will move away barricading her life with her skirts, she will wait naked above the night, with all her beauty free.

She will be able to show herself on the balcony of her beauty, she will be able to stroll with her white back full of nocturnals without it being important to her that the rain falls on her bones, the rain where rarely the hanged can be hung. But she smells the sadness, she hears the voice of the tombs and opens her mouth to chew death.

The man who approaches her has his eyes bound and raises a hymn or aquatic plant in his hand.

All the bridges collapse and the queen cannot pass, the queen with her brain perfumed by its thoughts, the queen with blue eyes smelling of the sea.

Fever escapes through her pores and her five senses die at the same door of mystery.

Only the breast of the heart goes on living, surrounded by its vassals, with all its statutory myths. It goes on living and gazing, looking like a bulging eye, without obeying the orders of the Creator who thunders from the depths of his sleep.

How many sacks of gold does the greedy man pile up in a cavern to buy that breast that will float toward the end of the centuries in their large barrel full of memories!

Perhaps a naïve child with his lips poisoned with chimeras is going to chew him now that so many hands stretch towards him. Perhaps he is going to free an embodied battle, beyond his years.

By the sex that is guessed, strolling under the clothes of shadow.

She is the ghost of transparent skin that has no face, but an empty roundness between her hair and neck.

Flee, delicate child, with your crown of caresses in her head. Flee, I tell you, to the caverns of the Pole and sing while legendary beauty listens to the sound of the bullets that race through it.
 
 

***
 

The net stretched from breast to breast others have been able to wait for.

During the night, the precious trembling hides in the marine caverns. There the pearl-diver goes down, and sometimes he has found stretched out of the waters a legendary young girl with bound arms. 

Then he climbs the scale again that hangs from the night and is lost in the zone of the birds-of-ill-omen.

From the highest peak he can throw a rope to the woman who is crucified in her spoils and raise her to the summit of the trees to which those still bearing the Deluge's memory climb.

Run to dry yourselves in the mouth of the volcano that will soon raise its flags in a sign of triumph.

Earthly child, when you try to reconcile the wings with your humid eyes, forgotten the fluorescences of the internal labyrinth, you forget the luminous cavern of the possessed.

The volcano will know how to remind you of what you forgot and will throw a flower at your memory and then you will see passing before you the whole universe as the native erect upon the mountain sees the hurricane passing and the river full of torn-down trees.

The woman we all know will go away from you along the edge of the wandering heavenly bodies, with the load of your mane on their backs, she will go off under the moon that is swollen with gluttony or perhaps by the periodic rain of the eternal snows. The woman will go off with a precious corpse under her arm and she will see coming towards her suddenly an island of violent colours.

Her majestic hair will fall on the sea amid the milennia-old algae. She will be dressed in madness with all her own light and she will be like a silk screen that the dying man gazes at.

Meanwhile, the other, in his prison of wisdom, will not be able to raise his eyes without seeing above each book, above each microscope the statue of the enormous breasts and a polished womb that enlivens its own heart.

That is the statue of living alcohol that spurts from the pores and falls in a cascade to fettered feet.

And the game you believed was the game of life, is in fact the game of death. 

Here is the man above the woman from the beginning of the world. The man on the woman eternally like the stone on the tomb.

You are no other than death on death. See the spasmodic gesture of her who dies in death.

Just so, you cross the life locked inside of death.

'Isolde, in vain you sigh in the night, in vain you shout my name when now I don't hear, when a sweat of blood covers my ears, when the sky voids itself into my retina. Every man is a coward. Don't believe in the exceptions that the dream, fallen from other heavenly bodies less palpable paints for you. The mystic is the man of terror, he is the man who does not wish to be alone, it is he who wishes he were two out of fear of being alone.'

Ah, if only you knew!

What would I not give to silence them with their bluish voice and break their forms and the colours of their eternal or transient feeling, always sweet, too sweet for the palate of an infinite shipwrecked man.

The events are above the human voice. The portent now condensed in a marble flag matters far more than all your arts, your tricks, your ploys.

The staved paper is a mastic without destiny. Future forests will not sprout from there, look at it and you will see that it scarcely marks a momentary vineyard.

The sea brings you the sensitive coffin up to the door of your house, even up to your very bedside so that you don't lock yourself in with your precious hysteria and with your shrieks, those filthy shrieks, filthy as the tears of the algebraic demonstration of pain.

Lock yourself up in it and let no seed issue from  your womb, that could be a piano with sunset microbes, a piano of a turbulent soul that leaps up like champagne.

Raise up your arms, woman, and ask pardon of the creature that sways between your legs and wishes to know nothing of the light of your small domestic lamps.

Blow, blow and put out those chimerical lights with a magic word. Blow and put out the statue now about to ask the way, now anxious to know tomorrow's weather.

Lower the finger with which you were going to point out the proffered destiny, your experience of darkness, while a ship is being shipwrecked and leaps from downpour to downpour, from abyss to abyss under the black sky.

Use your time better in waving your hair like a simple sea that listens to its smooth birds as it traverses evening.

Keep your night lectures for the crowd in a hollow fiesta when all lean on the port railings. Keep for it the ceremonial of your breasts no longer capable of steadying themselves. 

Then the king's coach must carry you with your womb and your legs, with your comet gaze through the throng that applauds you. What more do you want?

The palace has staircases that end no one knows where, the columns support the ojives from planet to planet to planet and in all the vases there are severed heads.

Through the grille one sees eternity asleep with an indescribable placidity. What more do you want?

That is your destiny. Leave everyone the liberty they have, at its the flight's start or its close as a branch or a port. And be quiet now.

The dying man purses his lips so  the definitive bird will not flee to sing its ballad on other rocks.

Everything obeys the cadence of a voice that no one knows where it falls from.

See the destiny of the magnetic butterfly.

See the skeleton patiently awaiting its hour, hidden in the shadows. The final skeleton that will play chess under its earthen house, while its hats live in the streets of others.

And you can weep because the tree's horoscope is similar.

Hide your caresses in the caverns of the polar birds in which man sticks stalactites in his eyes and woman runs leaping among the icebergs.

'Isolde', now the hurricane comes destroying the graveyard of gazes, now the hurricane comes with the speed of planets hurled out to destiny.

Let us hide in the deepest catacombs and there let us engrave our name on the sensitive stones next to the niche in which we must rest for eternity.

The forehead of Time bleeds in the darkness without repose of night, shattered it bleeds by mountains of thorns.

What does it matter!

On the terrace of the ultimate peak my throat was gulping all the thunders of the sky and my fingers caressed the back of the lightnings, while the sun behind the night regrouped its armies and prepares for attack on the following day.

Do you hear the noise of the waves crashing in the night?

Don't fear. Let's go. It is the sailboat of death. The beloved monster approaches and comes to lick our hands.

The earth is gentle and smooth like the mattress of eternity.

The wife invites us to the fiesta of her entrails. Her kiss tastes like God's lips and must bring us farther than a man can reckon.

Now you pass and I see inside your illuminated heart the geological arborescences that mark your age on the earth.

Do you hear the noise of the waves that crash in the night? Do you hear the noise of the waves smashing their head?

Now you pass and lose yourself in landscapes yesterday unassailable, and you leave by the roads ever alive and as equivocal as ever.

Soon you will meet the ghost that shouts: Everyone for himself, and throws its feelings and memories overboard  to make it lighter.

You will also find the man who throws out his years like the ballast of a balloon and then chants his thoughtlessness with the voice of a lover enchained and satisfied.

You will meet the man who knows everything, the repellent man who overlooks nothing, who always has a ready reply, a man who has studied the innards of the flower, who knows the past, the present and the future and the genealogy of every wave.

Despite everything, the Mystery will present itself dressed in luxury clothing. The delicate happiness of its pulsing breast or the pain of its eyes just anxious to be free, must not fear such a match.

Woman, look at my eyes, these eyes condemned to life imprisonment.

And you think I can enter into God like the diver into the sea.

But there is no God sufficiently profound for my heart, for the anguish of this heart accustomed to the greatest waves and the heart prefers to vegetate in its port and to rot among the algae.

Don't believe that I am afraid. 

Nor does a trembling shake me when my big eyes open and see what one sees at the moment of death. Because I have seen what you will see only then.

I am not afraid. I only tremble when sometimes I find my voice in a man of long ago.

'Isolda, look at me in the battle, look at me in the most desperate instant, when all is lost. Then indeed I am me and I certainly see myself more handsome than a ship fighting to the death against the sea.'

Thus I say and prepare myself to be root, while the earth flees roaring through the sky ... While the moon looks out of the corner of its eye and the air loses its own limits.

What are you doing there dressed in black? You are at the door of my house awaiting my burial with crowns and festive laurels. And if I command that my corpse should be thrown to the dogs?
 
 

* * *
 

Every burden is useless and memory only slows progress and bends backs.

From our necks hang so many arms and breasts and eyes of legendary virgins that our lips take the form of an obsessed flower.

The crime is compulsory if you wish to fly again. A rhythmic gymnastic murder or the confidence trick of the juggler who knows how to extinguish the flashes in the womb or their changing place at the precise moment, making them rise in the violin of the most careless. Thence they will rise in delicate scales to the ultimate peaks.

Enveloped in loops of fire, he who can dance will be the preferred one and only he will know how to how to enfold the legendary maiden in serpent spirals. There he will stay haunted until the end of time.

And you must know that the weight of the howl will not break the luminous circles when the macabre season arrives and the spectre's march to the Pole is seen.

Later will come the fiesta of mothers and the fiesta of brides erect on top of the tower with their eyes full of intimate ceremonies, their eyes open so that the four cardinal points may be born and that they may grow limitlessly and overbrim the world.

Ah, if you only knew! The hands of the monologue are raised to the forehead and shade the eyes to see further.

Everything is for what? Soon the tears will come and a death to choose in variety selected by the centuries.

Do you hear the nocturnal coffin being nailed? Do you see the beautiful nude in her aquarium of death?

The circumference of sighing in which we believe all that past is being buried can be people with a tropical vegetation and a vertiginous fauna.

Flowers will grown under the aquarium, flowers will grow under the grounds of the cemetery and one day there will appear above the earth the oldest coffin raised in the arms of  odours like robust stems.

'Isolde, the weight of your tears cannot break the marble. But see what the miracle of muscular memory did.'

Do you hear the nocturnal coffin being nailed?

You are the horse that the night mounts for its longest journeys.

Yet you will never reach the end. You will travel the whole history of men and you will not find what you have been  looking for.

The physical culture of gravediggers makes the world lighter and the spectacle tolerable. We know that the rain of the earth will be eternal, we know that autumn will be an always living fountain of leaves, an endless cascade among the branches, we know that the winter will extend its Pole to our eyes when sprays of water turn into statues in the middle of plains whiter than the moon. We know that beyond the boundary of winter the eyes of him who waits will see in vain and has forgotten that the fault was hers or at least she should have split it in two.
 
 

***
 
 

The winter will fly again stirring the heavy wings of someone who knows what unknown metal and it only because you knew how to seek forgiveness.

The legendary caravans that have no more title of nobility than their own antiquity will cross again, their indisputable experience similar to the pyramids or the seat of the mandarin who has seen past the music of so many centuries with no destiny apparent, forever fixed upon the naked breasts of the tortured, twisting beauty stretched out on infernal slabs.

Sometimes before the desired end a hospital appears open and ordered in its whiteness like a restaurant with its tables awaiting the equality of feeling.

The unexpected train departs to the satisfaction of its desires. Everywhere the gun in the trembling hand holds its breath.

Sometimes the ambush travels towards us, sometimes it moves off in other directions and seems not to have seen us or rather to have forgotten us.

Sometimes the thief flees, the hands the and severed breasts of the legendary beauty stuffed in his pockets, other times the doctor flees with his bag in which he hid the eyes of the unforgettable beloved.

Straight ahead the road continues and is only cut off in the sea. There the boats are waiting supported on the railings of twilight. At the moment of definitive parting the young traveller appears with her head surrounded by seven rainbows, hauling in her progress the chorus of supplicants who feed on her lovely breath.

She wants all that live to worry about her telling eyes, her lace-encircled neck, her shoulders wrapped in magnetic furs and her rainbow hat.

She, when she sees our light-pierced, takes fright, her bones tremble beneath her catastrophe-trained flesh. 

The instruments of torture are all similar in the inner base of the their raison d'etre. Even the doves that fly from sky to sky know this from their tenderest infancy.

The legendary beauty bound to her breasts lives in the innocence of her volatile hair. She has never seen one swallow desperate in its pitcher of air, nor other similar birds that wish to break the terrestrial atmosphere and to flee forever from our side.

She bows her head under the tattoos of the sky and sees nothing. It can scarcely be said that she feels the bonds of her womb.

And do you know why this is? Because there is always some dead woman lacerated by the daggers of the ghost hidden behind the curtains, that might finally make the gesture of refusal and naturally turn her face.

All brides sleep on the same couch.

There they are sleeping crossed by the same dream with their aquatic eyes swimming amid the same submarine algae. From the beginning of the world the leaves of virginity are falling outside their own autumn, without any reason.

The lamp that keeps vigil is like a jellyfish with wounded eyes. And they don't understand.

In the open window, the skeleton tenders its fingers so it lures birds it would irremediably loose to their migratory trends or to the forest's maganets.

The birds choking on their own musical instrument die, that instrument at whose rhythmic sound grow our vertebrae and the sap rises to the peak of the brain to nourish the luminaries with due pressure. And they don't understand.

Outside the throngs swarm and squabble fiercely over the stair-steps of the miraculous sanctuary. They rise from their knees through the scales of their hymns and try to kiss the claws of the convulsed dragon.

The captain of lilies defends the rights of his caste and will continue perfuming, while it lives and the triumph is his. For her part, the naked woman is flung with blows from above and goes lashing her breasts on the steps, her laments breaking there. 

Thus one day she will suddenly fall into the advisory chamber when the king is in conversation with his minions. She will be the key to the mystery, because truth escapes with the blood of her wounds.

There is the light, the light the monks do not want to see, concerned only with gathering as much manna as possible and with responding to the greetings of the dragon.

Blinded by the lightning bolts of God, they were worshipping, they were turned into a statue. That was an end that befitted them since the sphinx does not pay visits nor open its eyes to see the cataclysm.

Flee from here. Cross the immense river with the hooded crow on your shoulder, the river speeding by like a train and sustaining its pace to infinity. 

Cross the river that flows between palm trees and storks, palm trees bigger than the eyes of the beloved, the river you do not know, the one I'm pointing at, that which in the night is filled with magic lanterns and sleeps under its own awning if the indifferent shepherdess knows how to sing to its ear.

'Isolde, what is your voice and what should it be? Where is your voice and where should it be?'

You will make a harp with branches and frighten the bees. You will stay alone in the middle of the spectres you knew how to lure with your charms. Your delicate fingers will draw their best melodies out of the trembling leaves and your eyes up there will look at the world as the host within the monstrance.

Don't let the moon strip you, not allow them to hang you from some star the same that those hanged for beautiful crimes, the hanged who swing over eternity.

What does it matter to you if the groom jumps down from the tower and loses his eyesight on the way?

Leave him in peace. You will say that his eyes knew how to die with a modest heroism. Without failure, someone will gather the songs of the volcanic lover, will light a candle in his memory or will place a menacing crown on his defunct head where only the eyes still keep a certain life and all mornings rise to go on tiptoe sowing worries in your hardened breast.

You sing (O, mindless one!) while your serpent arms die like those of the oriental temple dancers.
The waves are slow to die out..

Do you hear the sea's coffin being nailed?

'Isolde, that other, also died. He, the guilty, paces away his last road accompanied by his crimes.
They all died. They were disembarking their statues at different stations.'

With her bound smile, that one remained in the middle of the fields. But there is one, there is one who ran aground on the sands of my memory and feeds on my cells.

One day we flew linked above the effervescent peaks. We rolled down the boundless abyss and raised sex soceries to a rite of a defenceless shipwreck. 

For five months my head went to sleep on your belly. That knot of arteries and bones made our luck even from our luminous meeting. Since then I live accompanying its funeral procession.

I am descending the ladder of her memory that each day grows longer and each hour more propitious, interwoven with the stars that gave her all their light, before dying, that fled for awaiting no reward.

'Isolde, sometimes I would like to drown in an ocean of women.'

Night reins on the two banks of your gaze and I stroll through the world, I stroll in silence, I stroll like the solitude of a dead man.

I stroll through the world without seeing the world, I stroll through the world without hearing the world, I stroll like the dignity of a dead man.

Do you hear? They are nailing my coffin. Do you hear how they are nailing my coffin? How they are locking up the night in my coffin, the night that will be mine until the end of the centuries.

I am slow, slow at dying. 

I don't fear nothingness nor would I fear it even if I I were not assured to survive in my echo, to endure intangible while rolling from echo to echo.

'Isolde, you are bound to meet me still many a time me even on many a roads of eternity.'

Some of you will also find me bearing guilty eyes, held in handcuffs and struggling to break them.
Look at the dead man who rises up on the high seas. Hear the voice of the dead man who stands erect amid his shroud of waves.

Look at the dead man who rises on the peak of the mountain.

Hear, hear the voice of the dead.

The great voices of the grandparents, the black voice that has its root in the profundity of the earth and takes years and centuries reaching the surface and more years and centuries in finding a ready throat.

The powerful throat that may be like a trumpet. The trumpet of the ages, the trumpet of all those who have suffered, of all those who have trembled in sweats of blood over terror and dejection, the trumpet of all those griefs, of all those hatreds, of all the vengeances. The trumpet of all the frightful roots.

Listen, listen to the voice of the darkness. Through my throat the darkness returns to light.

Enter your own vertiginous cavern, descend without chloroform your intimate profundities. The blood has its own light and bones give off sparks for a feverish match like an electric contact.

Ladies and gentlemen: There is a dead man who flattens his hair under his head inside his coffin. You have beautiful teeth to speak beautiful words.

Ladies and gentlemen: There is a bird that opens out in full flight and hurls eternity at us. It hurls at us blood and bowels like excrement. The bird foretold by the heavenly bodies knows all their secrets.

Ladies and gentlemen: There is a dead man who is becoming a skeleton in his coffin. The emanations of his flesh tear at the timber and make the stone doors oscillate.

You heard the tomb's door creak and you thought that at two metres deep there is a city of placid skeletons and biting skulls. There is a city of wax faces and wax hands. The dust of your bones suffers hardens the nights and falls like time in your internal sand-clock because your shadow has the form of the night and is a small night in progress.

You are there in that interminable position in which you remain after having drunk the infinite glass that distils emptiness and that converts you into respectable ashes of the immemorial ancestor. Out of all these ashes, chance can make a new heavenly body.

And I tell you, dear listeners that the unfortunate skeleton that is your guest will never see the light since the coffin will pass from your flesh to the coffin of burial. Thus, you bear a prisoner bound to your wandering, pitiless gaol. It is bad luck being shouldered by a frame bound to revenge it and only lying in wait for the opportune moment.

The prisoner's thirsty temperature equals that of an ardent sister, it feels heavenly deliriums in its innards, it wishes to leave that constant evening, to leap in a wild cawing as the volcano leaps from the depths of the earth and does not stop until it reaches the light, as the fright foretold sprouts from the breast and rises to the lips and the eyes converted into sores of silence. Your bones, drunk with solitude, feel the dew rustle in the blood and foretell that they are the last music, the final whistle after the end of the world only like the siren of a shipwrecked ship that would sound suddenly in the depths of the sea.

And when the bones, ladies and gentlemen, break the bonds that bind them together like constellations, their bang will be a fabled one, as the bang of catastrophe to attuned ears, mightier than that of distance set free and galloping off. Such is the greed of the fugitive prisoner who makes the roads howl and frightens the heartless, while his gestures encompass the universe. 

Ladies and Gentlemen: the shipwreck's snake chews its tail and gets bigger, it grows to infinity. Inside its coils we are sucked in by the abyss of the onsetting corruption, pus spurting through our eyes  as the scum of bays. Meantime inner landscapes feel the flight of trees, our ears come to hear, before they peel off and fall like leaves, the whirlwind of corn ears that get deeper. There is no hope of repose. In vain the skeleton behind its glass takes the hieratic attitude of one who about to sing. The planet's inner doors of the planet violently stop their ears like the carer of the sick who hears the shrieks of the terrible adventure of the last frontier. Nothing is gained by thinking that perhaps the voluptuous zone of astonishment stretches behind the abstract wall. No, you will not find the old man sitting, on the rocks of the eternal snowfall, smiling gently and surrounded by meditative heroes like palm trees.

Two words more, my friends, before finishing: Our struggles and debates are futile, our phosphorescence vain, both of our swords and of our words. Only the coffin is right. Victory is the cemetery's. Triumph only flourishes in the mysterious sown land. 

Such was the speech you have called macabre without any reason, the beautiful speech of the presenter of nothingness.

Move on. Go your ways as I myself do.

I am slow at dying.

Nevertheless, Isolde, prepare your tears. Distant affectionate one as a piano of remorse, prepare your best tears.

I am slow dying. The statue strolls above the sea and the wind closes my eyelids as a sign of a penetrating glory.

A mountain occupies half of my breast.

I bear a heart too big for you. You have measured your mountains, you have known that the Gaurizankar is 8,000 metres high, but you do not know nor will you ever know the height of my heart. Nevertheless, tomorrow in the depth of the earth I will hear, your footsteps.

Who will disturb the silence? Quieten that insolent noise.

It's my ancestors who dance on my grave. They are my grandparents who sound the alarm to awaken me.

It is the chief of the tribe you find feeling lonely and weeping.

Quieten your useless shouts.

See us finally asleep in the sex of the earth.

Since then the cataclysm of cities is alive. Walls and roofs fall allowing us to see entire villages naked in different attitudes, mostly imploring mercy. 

Arms and legs stick out amid rubble.

Then there comes also a collapse of the sky.How many birds died crushed.

Days later people strolled looking at the ruins. There was not a smile standing. Ghost went by howling with covered eyes, and a crazed man leaped from head to head with a dagger in his hand in search of a guilty god. 

Sweat, slaves, raise up future cities. Meanwhile I look at the career of forests. I contemplate the pirate of sunset and his slow plea.

Measure the earth to know how many miracles fit. Adorn the volcanoes, bedeck with flags the rivers, pierce the mountains. You will tell me tomorrow how many gods can be buried still with all their dreams.

'Wake up, Isolda, before the final turn revolt comes and your bed is riddled with bullets because no one believes in your truth.'

It will be necessary, I tell you, that your grace rise amid the cadavers, your grace chosen in the wheels of revolt, while fire destroy everything and begins to lick the horizon and to climb through the sky.

Towers bend under the boundless rain. Roofs fly burning.

Everything must pass.

From brow to brow the world is in silence. But there is something that keeps looking for us everywhere.

Plough the earth to sow prodigies. Throw ladder through all chasms.

Do tell me, what use is hope? The sailboats move off in the endless Golgotha, for fear of the storm. Everything stays behind.

The canoe that must perish is climbing the last wave.

The sky is slow at dying.

Do you hear the heaven's coffin being nailed?
 
 

Translated by Michael Smith